The Shamus Sampler II

by Nick Quantrill

  My client, Wellington Cathcart, was never accused of wrongdoing. Even Beckman’s fraud unit involvement was a routine insurance procedure for a large theft. And Cathcart simply didn't know enough about Kilgorn to discount the stale leads to Dominic's mother and Zandra that Reggie had provided him. But none of that meant I liked Cathcart, especially after I tried collecting the rest of my fee.

  He reminded me that he’d hired me to recover his paintings, but I hadn’t actually done that because the paintings were locked in a police evidence room. And as to my thousand-dollar retainer, he recalled a conversation about paying me half of it already.

  Somehow we settled on another two hundred dollars, in addition to the three hundred “half” he’d already paid. And then I slogged back to my office. For a nap. Rich people wear me out.

  *****

  “Mysterious Private Investigations,” the perky recorded voice announced. “Our agents are in the field, please leave your name and contact information.”

  I fell into a gentle sleep before hearing whether the caller left a message. Maybe I had another case. Maybe not.

  *****

  Peter DiChellis writes short mystery-suspense fiction. This story is a sequel to his jewelry heist yarn Mysterious Private Investigations, published in the first volume of The Shamus Sampler. Peter’s sinister tales also appeared recently at Shotgun Honey and Over My Dead Body!, and in the mystery anthology Plan B Volume III. For links to his published stories, visit his Wordpress site Murder and Fries. http://murderandfries.wordpress.com/

  *****

  This story is an original work of creative fiction. The people and events described or depicted are entirely fictional, with the exception of the Isabella Gardner museum robbery, which occurred in Boston in 1990. Any other resemblance between this fictional story and actual individuals or events is unintended and coincidental.

  Although this story and its characters are fictional, specifics about art theft, including the Gardner museum robbery, are based on published information from multiple sources. All descriptive details presented, however, are fictional and dramatized.

  Exceptions to the Rule

  by

  Phillip Thompson

  Phillip Thompson gives us a tale of revenge, showing the two-fisted spirit of Mike Hammer can still make an exciting PI tale.

  Mr. Allen had me in a spot. On the one hand, if I turned him down again for what I considered to be valid reasons, all of which amounted to me wasting his time and money, he'd consider me no different than the local cops. And that wouldn't help business. People come to me precisely because I don't act, think or behave like the local cops. On the other hand, if I did take his money -- again -- then his expectations would far outweigh my confidence in my ability to live up to those expectations, even with the edge I thought I had.

  I took his money -- again.

  A retired businessman, Bob Allen still wore decent clothes: charcoal slacks, starched blue shirt that held up even in the humidity, no tie. His face would have looked distinguished had it not been washed out from months of grief and frustration. Instead, he looked like a tired old gray-haired man. He stood over my desk, wrote out a check, the fourth one he'd written with my name on it. We shook hands.

  He walked out, past Jobelle, who watched his back disappear into the hall. I could tell by the way she watched him leave that she was thinking the same as me.

  That was the thing about Jobelle. She had an eerie sense about people, which was part of the reason she had been my secretary for the last five years. The other part of the reason had nothing to do with her looks -- the reason why most people figured she worked for me.

  That was easy to understand. Her raven mane fell halfway down her back and her eyes seemed like laser beams, especially when her dander was up. Her complexion and her full, athletic build and tapered legs hinted at a Native American ancestry, but I'd never bothered to ask her about that. There were enough people in this town claiming Chickasaw or Cherokee blood.

  The other part of the reason Jobelle worked for me had to do with the snubnose Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum she kept in a holster under her desk.

  Like I said, she had a sense about people.

  She rose from her desk, tapped on my door and strode in. As usual, she wore a tailored skirt and blouse, simple but damned effective. Her heels clicked to a stop about a foot from my desk. She crossed her arms and cocked an eyebrow at me.

  “I don't know why you keep chasing this one,” she said.

  I shrugged again. “We're getting paid.”

  The eyebrow again. “That all? Or you grinding an axe?”

  I leaned back in my chair looked out my window. I could feel the laser beams on me. “Nah. I mean, okay, sure, I've known Dale for years. He's never been worth a damn.”

  “And you knew Brenda.”

  “Yeah, I did. But, like I said, we're getting paid.”

  Jobelle knew when to leave things alone. “OK, boss,” she said. She was out the door before I could look up.

  I pulled open the right-hand desk drawer and yanked out the new pistol, the cleaning gear and my “old” Colt .45. Before Mr. Allen showed up, I'd just spent a sweaty hour and a half at the local police range, putting the new HK through its paces. I've always been partial to the Colt -- I'm old-fashioned about a lot of things, like firearms -- but carrying that cannon had gotten a little cumbersome. Not to mention obvious. Especially when there were equally powerful compact models around. So, I tried not to look at the price tag when I bought the HK. It didn't set me back as bad as I thought, courtesy of a fat paycheck from a divorce case last fall, and I had to admit to my local cop buddy who let me shoot on the PD range that I could get used to this pistol pretty quick.

  As I cleaned it I pondered the chances of having to use this particular handgun. As a rule, shooting a man is never easy. There are, however, exceptions to that rule. One is when the son of bitch has it coming anyway as the result of a transgression so vile that he has no reasonable expectation of a happy conclusion of his days.

  Dale Burnett qualified for this exception. But of course, shooting a man was still considered a crime in these parts.

  I reassembled the weapon and was wiping the Hoppe's off my hands when I heard Jobelle's heels clicking toward me again. She strode in carrying and reading the contents of the file folder in her hands. She stopped, as usual, a foot from my desk, even as she continued to read the file. Then, a small sniff. She looked up and cocked an eyebrow, her frosty blue eyes surveying the armory on my desk. I shrugged.

  She closed the folder and waited as I moved the weaponry back into the drawer, then wiped the desktop. She laid the folder in front of me. She had written “Dale Burnett” in neat letters with a black marker on the tab.

  I knew most of it by heart. Two years ago, Dale killed his wife of ten years, Brenda. He didn't do it himself, of course. He hired Tommy Kane, a known poacher, thief and general low-life in two states. Tommy lived along the Mississippi-Alabama state line, somewhere off in the deep woods among the network of dirt trails that straddled and crisscrossed the state line like a lunatic spider web.

  Dale hired Tommy to come to the Burnett house on a designated night -- a night Dale conveniently chose to spend partying down at the river with his girlfriend -- and stage a “burglary,” during the course of which Brenda would be killed. For this, Tommy would receive five thousand dollars. Where Dale came up with that much cash was still a matter of wild speculation.

  Problem was, Tommy, in spite of being a wily enough poacher to never get caught, was otherwise about as bright as a ten-watt bulb. He “broke in” to the house on the designated night and killed Brenda with a single twelve-gauge shotgun blast to the head. But Tommy had never killed a person, and he panicked when he saw the effects of a twelve-gauge at damn near point-blank range. So, he hauled ass out of the house without bothering to take anything that might suggest a burglary had occurred. He appeared at the river party at some time past midnight, according to the s
everal eyewitnesses that testified at trial, and met with a surprised Burnett, who shooed him away as fast as he could.

  Two days later, Tommy was seen in several of his usual haunts flashing a wad of cash. Like I said, not very bright. Two days after that, he was arrested and charged with capital murder.

  The trial, despite the mountain of evidence against Tommy, was a farce. The district attorney, a former Ole Miss baseball player and all-around squeaky clean crime fighter named Ricky Pennington, hammered Tommy and his lawyer, a local public defender, Peggy Winston. Poor old Tommy never stood a chance.

  But everyone in the building knew Tommy was taking a fall. He may have pulled the trigger, but we all knew that Dale Burnett was behind the entire scheme, especially when Pennington revealed the existence of a half-million dollar life insurance policy naming Dale as the sole beneficiary.

  The grieving husband sat in the second row during the entire trial, smirking and glancing at his cell phone as often as he dared with the judge glaring at him.

  The coup de grace for Tommy was Burnett's testimony. Burnett wasted not one second throwing his “good hunting buddy” Tommy under the bus, sealing his fate. He then expressed surprise, ignorance (which wasn't very hard for him) and shock at the revelation of the life insurance policy.

  I'll give Tommy credit for one thing: he didn't back away from the charges one inch. He could have gotten Peggy to plead him down to avoid the needle, but he didn't. This bravado, however, had no effect on the judge, who, after a guilty verdict, sentenced him to die by lethal injection and sent him to Parchman.

  When he passed the sentence, the judge made it known that even though “Mr. Kane has been tried by a jury and found guilty of a crime that he surely did commit,” there were other nefarious elements at play, namely, “Mr. Burnett, who, I am convinced, was in fact the driving force and co-conspirator in this heinous crime.”

  Problem was, the D.A. had scant little evidence tying Burnett to the crime, so he walked out of the courtroom free and uncharged. But we all knew.

  The life insurance company knew, too. And used the judge's statement against Dale. He never got one cent of the money that was the ultimate goal in the first place.

  In the end, Brenda was still dead, and Dale got away with murder. And Jobelle was right, though I didn't want to admit it to her. There was something else about this particular case.

  I knew both Dale and Brenda in high school, a thousand years ago. Brenda was a quiet, plain girl who grew up to be a quiet, plain woman who went to work, taught Sunday School, stay married to a philanderer and a sluggard and tried to put a good face on it. I liked Brenda. I never liked Dale. So, watching him walk the streets a free man really stuck in my craw.

  That's why when Brenda's father visited my office downtown four months ago I listened to his offer.

  His case was simple, really. Dale was up to no good, Mr. Allen, told me. It was only a matter of time before he did something else outside the law, and when he did, Mr. Allen intended for it to stick this time, even if the local cops wouldn't. I pointed out to him it wasn't a matter of wouldn't, it was a matter of couldn't. You can't arrest a man for nothing, and since the murder, that's all Dale had managed to do. Nothing.

  And that's how the Dale Burnett folder came to be. I'd been watching him for the last four months. Long enough to know that besides hiring Tommy to kill his wife, Dale had taken over Tommy's other business venture, dealing meth back and forth across the state line. Dale's was a low-level racket, buying from and selling for a ring that based itself up in Tennessee, just across the state line from Corinth. Dale was strictly a middle-man operative, which was about as much ambition as I'd ever seen from him. And he wasn't smart enough to cook it without blowing himself up.

  I made a few notes in the file, then pushed it aside. The afternoon sun had found my second-story office window, and a hot yellow beam knifed across the room, the dust motes doing a lazy ballet towards the corners. Outside the door, Jobelle clacked away on her keyboard.

  Dale ran that state line like a tightrope walker, never too far to either side, but always on the opposite side of whatever law enforcement happened to be after him that week. Of course, not being law enforcement, I didn't have to abide by such jurisdictional restraint, and I'd been able to piece together his network of users, runners, assorted thugs and dealers.

  I also learned that when it came to Dale's dealings, the local cops just wished he'd go away. My buddies in the local police department sang the familiar refrain of budget cuts, manpower shortages, and department priorities. The official line was, of course, that Mr. Burnett was a free man. Unofficially, the badges held that if Dale showed up face-down in a back alley, there wouldn't be much of a ruckus.

  So, I was able to operate with a certain amount of freedom myself. Which was how I knew about tonight's deal. One of Dale's lower-level dealers, Jim Burton, was also an occasional informant for me.

  Dale was meeting a dealer from McNairy County, Tennessee, known to me only as “Cotton” this evening to buy a load of crank. The rendezvous was a rickety bridge on a gravel road about three miles from the Alabama line, in a low-lying wood known as Bishop's Bottom. Spooky place at night. When we were teenagers, we'd drive our dates down that road at night to give them a good scare and prove our manhood by displaying an utter lack of fear at whatever boogey men that might have been hidden off in the swampy trees.

  Burton's info gave me an edge, the only one I'd had in four months and the main reason for taking Bob Allen's money again. Until now, I'd only heard about these deals after the fact. But, tonight, when it went down, I would be there to see the whole thing, and I was going to make it stick. My edge was only a small one, I knew. The location didn't lend itself it to surveillance, but I knew a few overgrown hunting trails off the gravel road where I could stash the car. Getting into position on foot wasn't going to be a problem.

  I opened the desk drawer and grabbed the HK and two mags. Loaded and holstered it. The new weight was a solid comfort on my right hip. The other mag went into my left front pocket. I heard the heels clicking again and looked up to see Jobelle standing in the door, keys in one hand, the other perched on a cocked hip.

  “See you tomorrow.” she said.

  I nodded. “I'll get the door. See you tomorrow.”

  I allowed myself the small luxury of watching her walk away, then took my time turning off the laptop behind my desk. Jobelle never asked about my after-work plans, and I never told her, but I didn't want to chance seeing her in the parking lot tonight.

  I grabbed my crumpled blazer off the coat tree in the corner. This may be a small, conservative town where everybody knows I'm a private investigator, but a gun on your hip in broad daylight still makes people uncomfortable. I shrugged into the jacket and walked the Burnett folder to Jobelle's desk as I left the office, yanking the door closed behind me. On instinct, I checked left and right in the dim narrow hall, even though this downtown building was about as safe as a nunnery. I shared the floor with a lawyer and a grass-roots charity that built houses for homeless people.

  Outside, the sun still scorched, even an hour before sunset and even in the shade of the tiny parking lot wedged between three downtown buildings. I shucked the blazer and tossed it into the backseat of the Mercedes. I cranked up and put the windows down, wiped the sweat off my face, then wheeled out onto Main Street. By the time I hit the city limits and rolled out on Highway 82 East, I had the air conditioner blasting, radio off.

  This part of the old two-lane was practically deserted, a result of progress and the four-lane bypass cut through the pines to the north a few years back. It was a perfect approach for a rendezvous such as Dale's. It was also perfect for my needs.

  After a few miles, I checked the rear-view and one-handed a right turn onto the gravel road that led into Bishop's Bottom. I smiled, feeling the familiar sense of apprehension of the place. In the failing light, the shadows lanced from the towering oaks and pines, and the sun mottled the floo
r of the swampy ground. In an hour, the entire area would be sheathed in blackness. I couldn't remember ever seeing moonlight filtering through the trees here. Just blackness and the sounds of the night: rustling, chirping, dripping, scraping. I've been in plenty of scary places and been terrified more times than I care to admit, but Bishop's Bottom still made me uneasy.

  The thrumming of the gravel against the undercarriage of the car soothed my unease as I neared the bridge. It crouched over a stagnant brown creek decorated with scattered green oak leaves and water bugs skittering across the glass-like surface. I guessed the one-lane span to be about sixty years old, maybe more. No guard rail. Slight sag in the middle, which made the wooden planks jump and rattle as the Mercedes rolled over it.

  I found the trail I was looking for about a quarter mile past the bridge. I put the car in reverse and eased between two massive oaks, through the wall of honeysuckle and briars until the car was completely hidden from the road. I checked my watch, saw I still had about half an hour before show time. I popped the glove compartment open and grabbed a pair of leather gloves I used when I needed to visit someone who wasn't home. Tonight, they would help against briars. From the back seat, I grabbed the black sweatshirt I also used on those visits and pulled it over my head, then slid the gloves over my hands. The heat would be stifling, even after dark, but that was a discomfort I had to endure.

  I climbed out and made my way back toward the creek. About halfway, I heard a car coming down the road, from the direction of the highway. Then a second car. Right on time.

  I eased behind a pine tree about fifteen yards from the bridge. Checked for snakes, then squatted down, yanked my smartphone out of my back pocket. A maroon Buick cruised up and over the bridge. For a split second, I nearly panicked, thinking the driver would attempt a turnaround exactly where the Mercedes was stashed. But in another second, the taillights flashed and the car crunched to a stop just off the edge of the road. I exhaled.